Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. This is John with CASA, and we're excited
for today's discussion on Bitcoin security the next hundred years. I'll quickly introduce
our panel. We have Jameson Lopp, our co-founder and CTO, Ron Stoner, CASA's head of security,
and our special guest, Dan Held from Kraken. Thank you very much, Dan, for joining us.
So I thought I would kick off the discussion by talking about the absolute coldest of storage,
cryopreservation. So imagine that the year is 2122. You're finally thawed out from your
cryotube. Is your Bitcoin safe, or at least do you think your Bitcoin is safe? Take it
away. Yeah, so I'll go ahead and introduce the topic. I think a lot of people have probably
heard about cryopreservation because of Hal Finney. Hal Finney being one of the original
cypherpunks and a good candidate for Satoshi. He signed up with a company called Alcor, which
does cryopreservation. Now, what does cryo mean? Is it like the movies where they're
like, you know, Star Wars where they're frozen like that? Or how does it work? Well, so the
basic hypothesis is with cryopreservation, there's a hypothesis that we have the ability
to cryopreserve an entire human, and at a later date, bring them back. Now, at first,
that seems like sci fi, that seems impossible. But there's a couple reasons why it could
work. One, it already works at smaller scales. So when we look at things like sperm and egg
cryopreservation, that currently works. The problem is scaling up cryopreservation for
larger organs and bodies. So for organs, they're starting to get close with animal organs on
cryopreservation. And that's a pretty, you know, that's a pretty large organic object
to cryopreserve and bring back no damage. And so we're edging towards that direction
of it being possible for humans. And the basic bet is when you get cryopreserved, the chance
of you coming back if you get buried in the ground is zero, and cryopreservation is greater
than zero. So by no means am I saying that it will work or that it's guaranteed to work
or that it's likely to work. You've got some shot at it working. And based on physics,
it's plot, it's possible, it's not plausible, it's not highly likely, but it's possible.
It's certainly possible to do it depending on how much damage has occurred. And so with
cryopreservation, the basic fundamental tenet of that is that your consciousness must reside
in your brain matter. And as long as the brain matter is preserved to such a high fidelity,
and we don't know what high fidelity is required, but if it's preserved at a high enough fidelity,
at some point in the future, we can undo some of the damage that was done to your body before
you know what that caught led to your death, plus heal the damage from cryopreservation.
So that's that's some of the basics. And that's the basic premise behind it. And when we look
at storing wealth through time now, so if you get cryopreserved, you might be in there
for a while. And so I think the exciting part of today isn't isn't necessarily spending
a ton of time on if cryo will work or not. More of just assuming it might work and talking
about the implications of that.
Yeah, this is a topic that I'm only somewhat theoretically familiar with. Actually, I was
at a Bitcoin meetup in Athens a number of years ago, where someone gave a talk about
this topic. And I found that there was a lot of interesting game theory at play or, you
know, potential security models or potential incentivization schemes that you could come
up with. And of course, this is the type of thing that I spend all day thinking about
is like, what is everything that can go wrong? And what can you possibly implement to try
to safeguard against those things going wrong? And this is a particularly challenging problem
space because, you know, generally, when we're we're thinking about security models, or wealth
preservation, what and whatnot, you're only thinking about the present and in short to
near term future and like what an attacker could do, given different levels of resources
that they're willing to devote to an attack, but like one of the many, many reasons why
this is a crazy type of thought experiment is that we're we're now trying if we're thinking
about like Bitcoin key management over an indeterminate time period, we're trying to
safeguard potentially against attackers who have an unlimited nearly amount of time to
try to break down your security model and get to the funds themselves. So there's certainly
a lot of things that can go wrong. And I've probably spent several days over the past
week or two, thinking about this problem, and have yet to come up with anything full
proof. But I think that, you know, kind of going back to what you said, like the whole
problem that we're talking about, there's no guarantee that it works in the first place.
So it's probably okay to have, you know, a good enough level of security, or perhaps
even a variety of different storage schemes, to try to sort of distribute the potential
failure so that no one thing is going to be catastrophic. So that if somehow you manage
to thread the needle and come out alive in 1000 years, then there's a also a non zero
chance that you might still have some wealth stored.
Yeah, so there's a couple different. So the cryo preservation folks, obviously, are cryonauts.
You know, they've been thinking about this as well for for quite some time. A lot of
them aren't Bitcoiners, which I find bizarre, but you know, to each their own. And so the
way that they've currently constructed it is that you set up a trust to oversee your
body through time, which is really, really interesting, because there's a couple different
tax implications as well, because technically, according to the IRS, you're dead. So it's
technically a tax free tax free donation. Because when you're dead, you know, to be
the recipient, you can't normally set up yourself yourself as the recipient of a trust after
you're dead. But anyways, you set up a trust to oversee your body through time. So, you
know, if the creation company went bankrupt, you could, your trust could facilitate the
payment of moving your body to a new facility, all sorts of things like that, which is really
interesting. And I was going to say that gets I was thinking the same thing. And that gets
a little bit scary to me when I think about that, because I know that, you know, with
debt, with mortgages, with a lot of financial instruments, they're bought and sold, you
know, wholesale and mass for debt recovery and things of that nature. And when James
and I were talking about this, I'm wondering if there's actually going to be a perceived
value based off of who the tenant of that cryo storage unit is to say what's their perceived
value when they thought, you know, are we dealing with somebody where they're they're
holding potentially well amounts of money? And in that case, are you then becoming the
asset or the NFT that's being traded based off your your rarity or perceived value?
Yeah, I mean, there's there's a couple different components here. One, you've got like the
trust that's set up through time, but that's obviously open a seizure by governments. You've
also got issues, you know, as well, even with self custody, private key management. So here's
the theoretical problem that the cryo folks have thought of. So let's say you memorize
your backup, right? So you've got a 12 to 24 word seed, you've memorized that you're
like, All right, well, you know, you could think about it two ways. One, you've got your
normal trust set up to resurrect you or to incentivize your resurrection to where you
get resurrected first in the future and oversee your body also. So let's say you have that
set up and you've got your Bitcoin is kind of like your retirement account in your head.
Well, there's two issues with that one is if anyone ever finds that out, in the future,
if they're able to bring your your brain and body back, they're probably going to be able
to parse through your memories and extract your private key, which is a pretty bad problem
because that means they could technically just keep you you know, keep you in that cryo preserved
state and slice your brain open, and just extract the information without ever cryo
resurrecting you. Which means that you're still somewhat in the suspended state forever,
or maybe they've introduced so much damage that you are technically dead now. And two,
so one one case scenario is that, you know, they're malicious and that they get access
to your brain and slice it open to extract the information to is a more it's more of
a fun game theory where you actually have the mnemonic in your head, you have your backup
in your head as a reward for successful resurrection. Which means that, you know, maybe we never
do have the technology to like parse through brain like parse through your brain in a in
that sort of state to extract information in in such a high fidelity that they'd be
able to resurrect a mnemonic. But maybe they're like, you know what, we can still we can bring
them back and Dan held on his body has a tag that says if you bring me back, I've got 10
BTC in my head. And so the fidelity of the resurrection will have to be very, very high.
Otherwise, the information in my brain will be lost, which makes me dead and also makes
them lose their their incentive. So there's a really interesting game theory with that.
It's the same problem for the uploader argument, you know, upload me to a metaverse, my mind,
my soul, my being my consciousness. And it's the same thing where you would have no control,
you wouldn't be able to control the thoughts that would be extracted. And in some instances,
to take this journey, you are giving up control, you know, the saying today's memento mori,
you have to die, remember, remember that you don't get to take anything with you. And you
can do trust in the states. But generally, that's being transferred to another physical
living entity. So when we're taking this journey, where we may be coming back, we're starting
to approach kind of new challenges and security paradigms and systems that I haven't heard
a lot of people in this space talk about, I've heard, you know, the longevity crowd,
the anti aging crowd, there's a lot of that. But when people are starting to talk about
will just freeze me or upload me or do do whatever, I'll be a robot, right? I'll replace
all of my dying body parts with machinery and technology, I'll be a transhumanist. Well,
what happens with all the exploits and everything that gets associated with that, and you still
can't prevent certain things from happening, even if you are able to attain immortality
or some level of robotic autonomy. The other things that I would challenge people to think
about with this is, you know, there's a time where banks used to contact all of their customers
and say, come into the office and we'll do a review of your account. And the purpose
of that was to verify the customer but also upsell services. So just because you're frozen,
this technology is going to keep advancing and there may end up being check ins from
time to time or somebody needs to perform maintenance or updates on you to either refreeze
you or to verify or to fix something that wasn't correct with the 1.0 iteration of the
system. So I don't know that people are necessarily prepared for that either because if you have
that perceived value and you're being woken up to be checked in on, how are those conversations
going to go and are you prepared for that eventuality as opposed to the surviving 100
or 1000 years and then being unfrozen for good. That may not be the option that's necessarily
being presented to you when you wake up.
Yeah, it seems to me like there's also probably a lot of human rights issues here. You already
mentioned Dan, there is at least currently something of a tax loophole because you're
legally dead. I'm wondering though, are you familiar with the Babaverse series? It actually
exposed an interesting potential issue I think with digitization of consciousness and this
long term cryopreservation stuff where it's a dystopian future in which basically the
governments have passed laws that deemed that cryopreserve people were not citizens and
didn't have human rights and they essentially became the property of the companies that
owned them and these companies eventually monetized them by essentially turning them
into AI that they then embedded in other devices and spaceships and stuff and so they essentially
became slaves in a digital sense.
There's all sorts of weird game theory stuff too where have you guys ever heard of Rocco's
Basilisk where folks say if you don't help an AI become sentient then the AI might come
back later and haunt you and so some people that are really freaked out with cryopreservation
get really scared about it because they're like well what if a malicious AI takes these
bodies and tortures you to some degree and brings you back and then just brings you back
to torture you and I think my thoughts on that is why would a machine spend all that
energy just to do something so silly like that? I don't think machines are exactly
just motivated by such cold revenge that they go resurrect millions of humans just to torture
them. I think that's very, very silly. But yeah, there's certainly some interesting
things as well of like when it comes to portfolio construction how would you even go about constructing
a portfolio? Let's say the government seizure of assets and wars didn't exist because those
add a lot of variability to this and I know that's a lot of asset security through time
but let's just say there wasn't. How do you even construct a portfolio that performs over
that much time? I mean in a way do you need to have some active management of it? You
know like for example if a quantum computer came out the Bitcoin protocol there are quantum
proof algos out there and Bitcoin could upgrade to be secure against it. There's moments like
that that happen over very long time horizons maybe 50 or 100 years and there actually is
kind of a case for not active-active management in your portfolio but I think as Ron put it
like somewhat of updating your systems. I mean I think Jameson you've had a great article
on this like Bitrot. You know for example your hardware devices are not going to last
that long. You definitely have to have it on metal perfectly. You know for me I like
Crypto Tag and they're one of my sponsors but it's made out of titanium. You know crush
proof almost fireproof and all these sort of things. But when you think about those
hundred year thousand year durations it has to be on something lasting and you almost
need some sort of active management. I mean there is by the way for those who are curious
the way that your body is cryopreserved is actually very very low risk and passive which
makes me very bullish on it. So the way that your body is kept cryopreserved is it actually
doesn't get frozen like a cooling and so your body yeah your body glassifies in a way which
is very interesting and if you look at cryopreserved organs you don't have like there's not frosts
on them. And so this preserves some of that cellular damage that occurs with some of the
cells rupturing due to the freezing process. Some of them still very they still get very
much damaged but there's a degree of damage that occurs. But cryopreserved bodies are
actually kept in vats of liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen is plentiful cheap and very
stable and you basically what they do is they put these bodies or if you just do neuro preservation
just your head and these things called doers big big big aluminum containers. I think they're
aluminum they might be steel or something but they put these bodies in these big metal
containers and fill it up with liquid nitrogen. And liquid nitrogen evaporates at a pretty
slow rate and so they basically fill these things up once every month or so. And so humans
can walk away for an entire month and the bodies are fine. And you can actually build
much more robust systems and Ralph Merkel guy behind Merkel trees actually grabbed lunch
with them when I lived in the Bay Area. He's on the board of Alcor and Ralph Merkel talked
about how to build cryopreservation cryopreservation for the masses like how do you make cryopreservation
show so cheap that everyone in the world who passes away in the clinical sense could be
cryopreserved and maybe resurrected at some point. And at scale using these techniques
using very safe very long lasting techniques and these these facilities can last for forever
if you had a and you can bypass of liquid nitrogen compression machines that takes the
air and compresses liquid nitrogen out of it. And those are passive machines with no
moving parts. You can actually have these facilities run without people there for potentially
you know 50 to 100 years which is really cool. But that was a little bit of a little bit
of a sidestep there. I'm going off on a tangent here talking about the process. But you know
when you think about your money though you know how do you have your money on that autopilot
or like and I think Bitcoin is the only one that's resilient enough for that. I would
want to hodl for 100 years right. It's if you were to pick one now I think almost everyone
would pick Bitcoin as if you would pick any asset out there real estate stocks bonds it's
going to be Bitcoin. You know I still think there are some issues around some upgrades
that might be needed given like a quantum computer or something else. But I'd be curious
to hear your thoughts Jameson on stuff like that like Bitcoin protocol upgrades that might
impact your backup or private key management for that long.
Yeah this is yet another one of the many challenges of talking about sort of far future looking
storage because you know we're talking about a protocol that's only 13 years old. And while
the protocol and the community and the ecosystem around it over the past decade I think it
has become clear what the principles are that are held most widely and most strongly and
are therefore most likely to be retained for the far future. You know these things like
having forward compatibility and not making changes that that basically break people's
wallets or that would make their money unspendable for any reason. You know a lot of very thoughtful
engineering and design goes into keeping these principles as we make changes to the protocol
because you know it is software it is a kind of a living document if you will really a
new form of communications and language just for money itself. We can certainly you know
hope and that would be a foundational principle I think of storing your wealth in Bitcoin
for an indeterminate period of time. For at least for the quantum computing stuff I think
one simple thing you would want to make sure you do is not reuse any Bitcoin addresses.
As long as you haven't ever spent from the funds that you have in cold storage then those
public keys should not be accessible they haven't been put out on the blockchain therefore
they're actually protected by several other layers of cryptography that make even a quantum
computer with sufficient qubits would be unable to brute force the private key because it
wouldn't even have the public key in the first place. But I think it all comes back to this
issue of I guess you could call it active management but at least having some sort of
guardianship that is able to make small tweaks and the thing that really comes to mind for
me from some of the multi-generational wealth management books that I have read if you look
at case studies of some of the longest running wealth management entities these tend to be
families I think a number of them are like Japanese and Asian origin the ones that have
been successfully running for over 500 years many many generations. A component to that
is actually family and raising your descendants with a set of principles that can guide you
all as a family unit and continue to maintain a successful posture from one generation to
another. If you don't do that then pretty much all multi-generational wealth management
experts will tell you that your family will lose all of its wealth within one or two generations.
Jameson and Dan are kind of getting to the same summation that I came to is that if you're
looking for you know anti-aging anti-death longevity either through any of the methods
mentioned you do have to put some degree of trust or custodianship into another person
and they need to do things like the protocol changes the updates security vulnerabilities
if there's major consensus changes with forks or maybe it's not backwards compatible for
whatever unforeseen reason hopefully that doesn't ever occur there's a lot of things
that you know can potentially go wrong that we don't see today that you need to really
encompass in this strategy for a hundred or a thousand years. Dan mentioned metal and
that's great but are you going to know where that's physically located when they wake you
up in a hundred years is that location still there is the fire safe still there did the
building burn down or was it bombed in a war right we've seen some of that stuff today
in different parts of the world that when you're asleep and you're you're frozen you
don't have control or awareness of a lot of that and what I would say to people is Jameson
I think if you're talking generational wealth and multi-generational there's an incentive
for your family to kind of keep that going but if you're if you don't have that multi-generational
wealth and you've put that degree of trust into somebody or into a family member that
has no connection with you what stops them from taking that wealth or plugging you or
deceiving you there's a lot that can really go wrong and in that instance if that's your
concern and you're worried you know we have inheritance today that's as best as we can
we can get as these inheritances and these trusts we can pass it on we can ensure it's
allocated for but this is the new problem is if we want to keep it and we want to come
back you know there's no good system for this there's no product and as Dan said we're still
fixing the technology and getting to the point where we can prove that that's doable and
in a state where we can remember those things those brain wallets in these weird security
games that people play with themselves to try to try to protect stuff but we have to
get there first and until we do I think we are really highlighting some of these uncomfortable
decisions and thoughts that people need to have when they're thinking about this related
to all of this I was wondering Dan if you've ever heard of the domino of love strategy
I have not what is it it's really related to this multi-generational stuff but it has
to do with actually incentivizing your resurrection and the whole idea is this kind of goes back
to what I was talking about sort of familial principles is that one way to try to incentivize
your resurrection is to build a belief and value system with your family and your descendants
that they should also be cry or preserved because you know there is from a technical
and scientific standpoint we know this is a last in first out problem where the people
actually who are preserved last like furthest in the future will actually be the first to
be revived because their bodies will be in better condition and won't require as much
advanced technology to revive them so you actually have this sort of reversal domino
effect where you want the your your descendants furthest in the future to be incentivized
to work to to revive their parents and then once they are revived the technology for revival
keeps improving you know they will because hopefully they love and miss their own parents
they will then do the same thing and this sort of creates a domino effect a chain if
you will of course there's a number of assumptions at play here but I think it's just an interesting
game theory yeah so I'll kind of go off on my my final rant here where I've thought about
these sort of structures for a while one you know when you think about the facilities that
you would store these in like so I would imagine a company let's call the company stasis so
stasis is the biggest cryo preservation company in the world right and let's say stasis commands
like a massive market share like 90 percent market share so stasis would probably create
a strata of different storage techniques you know for example it could be stored in an
old nuclear silo with passive technologies to where they're like look you know if there
was an incident it'd be 20 years until someone would need to go check on it they'd have active
monitoring and it could withstand a direct direct hit from a nuclear weapon you would
probably want to have the bodies mixed and what do I mean by that you'd want to mix it
based on country race language religion everything else that way you would minimize your terrorist
risk you know for example maybe you you mix presidents in with normal bodies and everything
else to where you wouldn't have a circumstance where there's a concentrated group of individuals
that could be targeted after they get cryo-preserved you know to the LIFO you know last in first
out methodology it's definitely to be LIFO where the late the last technologies to be
created a cryo-preserved people will be the best ones and those people would be resurrected
first because it's the quality of their cryo preservation is so pristine you know when
I think through you know when I think through how you could incentivize society or your
family to do this you know the trust structures actually lead to something very very cool
and exotic so let's say let's say stasis has an agreement with their collective cryo-preserved
humans and let's say they hit like a billion humans right and stasis is overseeing all
of the trusts through time now the trust are held in different multi-sig arrangements and
everything else to where stasis can't run away with the money or do something malicious
with it but they do have a good amount of control over the trusts and they have the
ability to move funds given that certain parameters are met for example the technology becomes
available to resurrect someone what's really cool is if if stasis decides to publicize
the aggregate amount of value being held in the trusts to resurrect certain types of individuals
so as an individual who's cryo-preserved you can choose hey when the technique has like
an 80% success rate bring me back or 90% or 99% or you know because if you're already
cryo-preserved who cares if you wait 10 more years to make sure the process is working
right because it's the time difference for you is the same and so you can specify you
know when you would like to be resurrected or like to what degree of quality would you
want to be resurrected in if the technique is is x x you know works x percentage of the
time you can you can also create things that are really interesting too where you can give
free cryo-preservations to people given that they're test dummies where you're like look
you're going to be buried in the ground and you have zero percent chance of coming back
so we'll do your cryo-preservation for free under the stipulation that we get to experiment
with the resurrection techniques on you but when you look at you know the long-term incentivization
model the assets held by a billion people over time are compounding with no withdrawals
right so let's say this company stasis has a billion people in cryo-preservation and
the app you know and they've got you know 30 trillion or 50 trillion dollars dollar
equivalent worth of value stored and they can go basically build an x-prize for cryo-preservation
resurrection where they're like look there's a hundred billion dollars sitting on our customers
accounts to resurrect if there's like an 80 percent chance of it working and so that's
an extremely strong incentive and that incentive compounds over time because there are no withdrawals
from this fund this becomes the biggest fund in the entire world and the fund incentivizes
permanent life or everlasting life and so basically the fund compounds until the incentive
is so great that humans deploy enough capital to go solve the problem and receive the x-prize
award essentially.
Amazing indeed though of course my pessimistic and adversarial thinking takes me to a worst
case scenario of you know what if we end up with all the bitcoin ogs cryo-preserved and
due to the you know deflationary aspects of the currency it actually turns into an issue
where you know these days people are going to be complaining about like the top one percent
owning like 50 60 70 percent of all assets well what if it turns into like the top point
one percent of all assets of actually people who are even no longer alive own 90 percent
of all of the wealth that could also create some really perverse game theory of people
wanting to then you know destroy those cryo-preserved humans and basically you know destroy a large
portion of the money supply because it would enrich everyone yeah that's that's why you
mix them with their parents and then keep the location and then you keep the locations
of their parents semi-secret where you're like look if you want to go seize the wealth
of these people that violates your parents clause and your parents bodies will be destroyed
so you know if we discover that this you know you could the game you become a company of
that size becomes bigger than the Dutch East Indies company becomes bigger than all the
governments in the world at a certain level because then it becomes it becomes involved
in everything and and cryo-preservation won't be a wealthy person's thing at all cryo-preservation
at scale as described by Ralph Merkel and as specked out by him he has got a great article
on this in back of the envelope math with today's technology you can cryo-preserve every
person on earth and it would only cost a half a penny a year to keep their bodies cryo-preserved
so cryo-preservation won't be a wealthy person's thing it'll be a standard operating procedure
at some point in time when it's like hey you know we've been bringing you know this is
the logical step forward I mean it is the logical step to do right you have a zero percent
chance of coming back if you get buried you've got a greater than zero percent chance of
coming back if you're cryo-preserved and and within the realm of physics it's definitely
possible that it could work but yeah I think that you become so massive and so intertwined
with everything that the negative game theories yes could exist but there's not one facility
there's thousands of facilities across the world and they're mixed with all sorts of
peoples and nationalities and everything else and you know you have some pretty strong you
know game theory and incentives that could combat that where you're like you know you
could destroy your family's legacy or forfeit their trust if you were to act negatively
against the process but yeah yeah no they could definitely go south though I mean there's
a there's a most ways it will go wrong let's put it that way I'm not I'm not that much
of an optimist but I still think there's a good chance it could work there's no good
multi-signature system for the living and the dead to coexist yet but I imagine there
will be at some point and I hope CASA develops it and guys appreciate you having me I've
got I only had 30 minutes today but this is a fascinating topic as you guys could tell
I kind of geeked out on this a lot of people get weirded out by it it's a very strange
there's a lot of like different dimensions to this about consciousness and choir preservation
ethics and morals and 30 minutes definitely wasn't enough time to cover it but maybe we
do v2 some other time but I appreciate you all having me and thanks for thanks for having
me on thanks for joining thanks thank you Dan so we'll continue the discussion a little
bit so something that we haven't really covered yet is the prospect of time locking Jameson
or Ron would you be able to explain whether this is a viable strategy yeah you know time
locking is actually something that comes up pretty frequently not even you know with regard
to this afterlife issue but we have people who ask you know how can I time lock my funds
just to make sure that a I don't do something stupid like panic cell or be that you know
even if I am somehow being coerced that there's absolutely nothing that I can do or anyone
can do because the funds are they are you know literally locked by the protocol there
there is no one in the entire world who has keys that can possibly move them until a certain
point in time and you know we've been we've been kind of pushing back against implementing
time locks for a while because it creates a lot of issues both with recovering your
wallets because now you're putting non-deterministic data into your locking scripts which is going
to break your deterministic you know seed based backups and secondly because if you
if you really think about the the game theory of what happens to time locked funds if an
attacker gets your private keys then it never ends well and the reason why I say that is
because while the time lock will successfully prevent an attacker who gets your keys from
spending the funds until that point in time once that time arrives what's going to happen
is depending on who has the keys you know perhaps the attacker has a copy and you still
have a copy then you enter into this race to the bottom where essentially you would
both be looking to broadcast transactions and probably doing replace by fee on those
transactions to incentivize miners to confirm a transaction that basically sends all the
funds to a new address that only you own well you know what's going to happen the attacker
is going to be happy with getting absolutely any amount of that money and so I would expect
that you know both you and the attacker would be continually replacing the transactions
with higher and higher fees trying to bribe the miners and of course lower and lower amounts
of the actual funds eventually going to yourself so even even I think if you did end up getting
your funds back it would only be a tiny portion if anything because of the sort of race to
the bottom game theory that results the other concern I would have with that we did a paper
fools post from the cause of law the one on blog.keys.casa.casa centurion and it was a
product a hundred-year multi-sig time lock solution so that when you're in cryo your
family can't get access to your keys that's exactly you know what's going to happen I
think there's way too many situations and scenarios that when you wake up you may not
be have to deal with the one I would be immediately concerned about is what jurisdiction am I
in what is their local laws and what is their local tax policy because if I've been frozen
for quite some time or I've locked my keys for quite some time I don't know what the
lay of the land or what that situation looks like when I come out of it on the other side
and as Jameson said I might be able to recoup some but who's to say you know we haven't
seen some massive crypto tax or you know things haven't gone wrong in that case hopefully
not I'm hoping for the inverse but these are the questions I want to ask myself that people
worry about today and I don't think they extend that time frame out a hundred years or a thousand
years and say well these are the same concerns I have what does it look like now and it's
very very hard to answer those questions so by time locking all you're doing is guaranteeing
that you're setting yourself up to handle that situation and figure out what you need
to do when the ship goes with the fan it's also a question of flexibility right so we
kept harping on this issue of having guardians or managers who are able to stay apprised
of the situation with the ecosystem or the world at large and if needed make adjustments
when you're time locking let's say you're time locking multi-signature setup this actually
prevents you from making changes to that key set and so one of the very valuable features
that we have in CASA is the ability to rotate out one of your keys you know if for any reason
you believe that one of those keys has become compromised we make it very easy for you to
replace it with a different one but if you think about it if you've put your your funds
into this super cold storage that's time locked then you can't even make those type of adjustments
you can't manipulate the properties of the key set and and so in a way it actually makes
your robust distributed key set somewhat more brittle because if attackers start chipping
away at the pieces of your key set you know they now have a really long period of time
in which to slowly compromise your key set one key at a time meanwhile you're not able
to do anything about it and you're not able to think of it as kind of like fainting away
you know parrying the attack if you will by replacing keys with new ones that you know
are not compromised thank you the next question i have is about the digitization of consciousness
if you were going to upload your consciousness say in perpetuity and you were going to embark
on this right now how would you go about it are we talking about a smart contract platform
or some sort of complex AI i think if i had to do it today i would just want a one-to-one
copy when you get into forensics and data there's some differences between file types
and metadata and was it a file level backup or a block level backup and that's all just
in its difference on how the data is being stored on the back end i would want to get
as close to like as a one-to-one raw data block level backup of my memory and my consciousness
as i could but the only way i would go doing that is if i had some sort of encryption or
control where somebody else could maintain that somebody i trust or somebody in my family
the only reason is that i do know things in my head i do know the locations of seed phrases
and items and things that were very sensitive so if i'm uploading my conscious one-to-one
and it's in clear text what stops you know that theoretical company from going through
their backups or their files and saying let's see what's in ron's head or what ron experienced
in his life because i'm board service tech and you know it's late at night we see that
people that happens with your credit card bills with cable bills people of all industries
go snooping sometimes so i would want to make sure that i retain some degree of control
otherwise i think i'm not moving my conscious forward sometimes the best move is to not
make a move and if i'm not confident in that technology where i'm not confident they're
going to be able to bring me back and recover my funds i think at that point i'm going to
have to seek control and hope that somebody else in my family or my lineage is ready to
enjoy that yeah i mean the problem right now is that we don't really understand the brain
that well we don't really understand what makes you you uh we don't know what the exact
data structures are required in order to perfectly recreate your consciousness what we do know
is that you're simply mapping your neural pathways is not sufficient that there's there's
far more to it that really goes down to the probably molecular if not atomic level and
so like this is why people are currently using the same substrate to preserve the data and
by substrate i mean your physical brain is because uh you know whatever the level of complexity is
in your physical brain that needs to be uh replicated or reproduced or simulated somehow
digitally uh we aren't at that point yet we're still missing pieces of the puzzle and you know
this is the hope is that if you cry or preserve yourself well enough that hopefully there has
not been data loss or corruption of that substrate but who knows i mean maybe maybe it's uh such
that as soon as you die even if you get cry or preserved within a day or within a few hours
maybe there has already been sufficient corruption of that substrate you know we won't really know
the answer to that problem i think until we're at the point that we can actually uh read the data
and then recreate the consciousness but that is it's that's certainly the bet is that if you do
it fast enough and well enough that hopefully there is a a period of time shortly after your
your legal death that you're still able to your snapshot that data thank you um at this point
i'm going to open it up to q and a but uh while we get some requests in the queue i'm going to
um throw up one question so Jameson you've been working on this project of getting old versions
of bitcoin core to sync from scratch um from all of your research do you think that there is a way
to run a node forever well
this is where this the research gets kind of complicated um and and also it turns into a better
a philosophical question of like whether or not bitcoin has ever hard forked and whether it's
always been forward compatible is that what we found is that for a a number of the really early
versions of bitcoin core basically the 0.7 and earlier um they had an issue with the type of
database that was being used by the node and these versions of bitcoin core never ran into issues
during the periods during which people were actually running the versions however now you
know 10 years later we find that due to the increased data volumes and complexity of the
blockchain and and all of the database operations that end up happening in the node the node is
actually grind to a halt because there are some sort of default limits on the database operations
so could or is it likely that something like that will happen again uh you know 10 20 30 years from
now i think the answer is yes you know this is a reason why software needs to be maintained
in perpetuity is because the world is a complicated place and and even though your bitcoin core
bitcoin core uh developers have done a very good job of removing as many dependencies as possible
from the software there's there's still other libraries that that's using and there's things
that happen you know in the world at completely other layers um basically affecting you know
computer science and cryptography and security best practices in general that make it such that
if you are not continually maintaining and applying security patches and updates you know
unmaintained software tends to become exploitable and you know this is even basically true at the
level of math and your cryptography in general is that over long periods of time cryptographic
functions end up becoming weaker and vulnerable because our understanding of cryptography
improves and this is just the name of the game of security in general it's it's a never-ending war
so you know while you'll probably be able to run a node for many many years it's it's also probably
only a matter of time before that node itself becomes vulnerable in some way just because
our understanding of of the space and the code has revealed vulnerabilities that were there
all along i think it won't be uh if bitcoin protocol itself it fails i think it'll be all
the associated infrastructure or hosting capabilities or dns or tls um it's very hard
to keep servers going and and sometimes the servers at the most up time are like the laptops that's
on top of somebody's closet somewhere that they haven't touched in 15 years the ones in the data
center that have the drive recursion and dual power supplies and redundant power uplinks those
are a lot of times where you see the failures which is why they have the five nines of service
up time and slas to show you who's actually doing it right and who's not so like my concern would
not necessarily be the code updates because it's very easy to automate pulling down code bases and
doing database migrations but i think what's very hard is how do you how do you replace a failed
piece of hardware how do you fix a cloud service that goes out of business how do you architect
for those types of things so i'm going to go the inverse to say i don't think you can ever run a
node forever i think you always are going to need some maintenance or some administration or a touch
point being able to keep the ecosystem going and there's nothing wrong with that it just ensures
we're doing it correctly thank you um the last cloud bender i added you to the stage you have
a question for us yes sir thank you very much for this uh space i read a blog from j mason about
you know retention of keys and the best practices it's a very good blog by the way
so question is about sskr which is also sometimes referred to as shamir shards the question is how
do you recommend preserving keys the private keys 24 words or 12 words for a really long period of
time by just putting the 24 word directly on a steel or titanium or do you recommend sskr and if
so how do you then preserve these shards and do you also put these three shards or more shards in
three different pieces of steel or titanium what's the recommended approach yeah this gets pretty
complicated right um i i would say i have not recommended sskr to anyone um it's it's still it's
fairly technical um i think that something like seedzor is actually a lot more straightforward
for non-technical people to use and it's also the nice thing about uh seedzor is that it's
it's essentially using seed phrases uh kind of on top of each other it gives you this level of
plausible deniability where each piece of it looks like a completely valid seed phrase in and of
itself and as a result it's also very easy for you to then go ahead and be able to reuse any of these
steel or titanium uh plates out there uh because you're still using the bip 39 word list so um i
think one of the things that i mentioned in that seed phrase backup article is that you know if you
are using seeds or the the default is basically a two of two backup um i was told later on that
it's possible to do others it just it gets more complicated and i think uh leads to problems where
the average person might shoot themselves in the foot so i would think the the user-friendly less
technical good option would basically to have multiple pairs of these uh seeds or plates and
then distribute them around in many different places so that you know none of them are a single
point of failure and uh to add to that i think distributing them around that's different
connotations for the the physical world versus the uh ethereal world and what i mean by that is i made
the joke a little bit earlier about the life and death multi-signature product but it's the same
thing with seed doors where if i was going to upload or we're talking a thousand years that may
be something where my estate or the executor or the guardian of my uh cryo tube or whatever i'm
in at that point um you know has one piece of it and i have the other piece of my head and that's
the contingency is we need to bring ron back successfully so that we can get his part of the
seed door and then he can unlock the wallet and do the final step something like that would give me
a little bit more degree i think of comfortability than knowing that i had everything in one seed or
somebody else had full control over it while i was in long-term storage
thank you um frank i added you to the stage do you have a question for the panel
hi thanks for inviting me out jimson and um yeah i just i'm just going back to the cryotherapy
discussion that you had not so long ago um how was it would it be possible i know you kind of talked
about the the brain and memory um but if it was possible to in the futures stand each kind of
nanosegment of the brain would it be possible for a company to be able to identify memory of that
person who was cryogenetically frozen and then find out perhaps where they have their seed phrase
hidden or where it might be stored yeah yeah absolutely you know i don't i don't see why not
you know i think this is one of the many many reasons uh that i landed on of why it's very
difficult to come up with a self-custody solution that works when you're dead and uh you know cryo
preserved uh the the way that essentially i ended up thinking of it is when you're cryo preserved
you are essentially a prisoner um you know you are you are in someone else's custody they have
all of the time and resources to do whatever they want with you and one of the the many problems
here is that you you don't know whether or not they'll be able to scan your brain and i think
you have to assume that they will because eventually if the technology gets to the point
where you can ever be resuscitated then they would have to be able to you know scan everything and be
able to understand you know what makes you you what makes this memory here and so anything that
you're you're keeping as a a secret in your mind whether it's a seed phrase that you've directly
memorized or even if if you've set up essentially a treasure hunt that you know you've distributed
your metal plates in these different locations you know that could also be retrieved by an attacker
and then they could leisurely take their time going around uh scoping out all these locations
and figuring out you know how to get the different pieces of um your your keys and wallet back
together so you know that's one of the reasons why it seems like it's better to to use some sort of
external solution whether it's you know whether it's a legal framework based trust or or a
distributed multi-sig that is is basically handled by other people your your heirs and descendants
and and and essentially you know something that is a bit more flexible so that they can also
make changes over time if needed but yeah this is a very complicated uh type of of model to to think
about and there's a lot of unknowns but i think i've i've written down and identified at least like
a dozen things that could go wrong and i don't see any one of these things that could go wrong
and i don't see any one straightforward solution that will guard against every possible thing that
can go wrong it hurts when when you get scammed or when i've seen people get rug pulled on various
things that are out in the industry today but i can't imagine the hurt and the pain when you get
unfrozen after 100 years and realize you were scammed or run pulled that's really got to stink
yeah i think um one way that i've heard it described is um you want to ensure that if you wake up in a
thousand years you're a rich tourist not a uh a poor um person who's completely out of place
uh because one of the things that we haven't talked about is that if you okay so we're basically
talking about time travel but we're not talking about uh time travel back in time we're talking
about time traveling to a point in time potentially so far in the future that almost everything about
society has probably changed so if you wake up in a future a thousand years from now it's going to
be similar to if someone in medieval times got prior preserved and woke up today they will have
communications issues they will have cultural issues they'll probably have a lot of beliefs
that will be considered you know savage or backwards or outdated or whatever and they
uh and they probably won't have any skills that will actually be monetizable other than perhaps
the fact that they're an oddity and could be some sort of you know sideshow attraction so if you if
you wake up a thousand years in the future and you're destitute you're going to have some major
major hurdles to overcome it'll it'll be you know i think far worse than what you know someone who
immigrates to a new country today will have to deal with thank you um crypto magnet i added you
to the stage do you have a question for the panel yeah i was uh i'm one of the coordinators for the
demoine bitcoin and blockchain uh network meetup group and i was wondering if any of the speakers
here would be interested in giving a presentation over um over zoom for us we had Jameson we had
Jameson lopp a couple years ago he was outstanding and i appreciate this conversation you guys are
having on here thank you um yeah if you'll send us a dm and we can uh we can chat um okay um i'll
keep the discussion moving just for the sake of everybody here no problem um ignacio i i had to
do the stage do you have a question for the panel hello everybody thanks for the space
i don't have any question right now um i was interested in the applications that could be
built around bitcoin and i was wondering if ethereum or other smart contracts what in your
opinion is the the most areas with most potential thank you are you talking about within the the
context of long-term wealth security over the next hundred years yes the security of the ecosystem
built around bitcoin such as lightning network smart contracts ethereum and so on
yeah you know there's very different approaches from these different networks and i think it's
not controversial to say that bitcoin as a an ecosystem uh is a lot more conservative about
changes that it makes it tends to be more focused on security rather than functionality whereas
most of the what would be considered more feature rich smart contracting systems seem to be focused
on making changes at a faster pace you know evolving adding more functionality um and
that really always it leads you to question you know what is the long-term viability or how long
will they be able to do that now on one hand it means those systems are more flexible and they
can respond to certain threats faster you know there's a number of occasions throughout the
ethereum history where various vulnerabilities or like denial of service issues were discovered
and they made fairly fast changes that were you know hard forks and basically not forward compatible
changes and you know that allowed the system to continue working and being usable but you know
when you're using a system for your super long-term storage where you don't necessarily know what
the next time is that you're going to be able to spend the funds i think that's when you want to
prioritize the thing that is is more conservative but you know it's really hard to quantify um you
know it's hard even to talk about this type of stuff with regard to bitcoin because we have
a whole 13 years of history and we're talking about problems on a time scale of hundreds if not
a thousand plus years so you know this is all very speculative and uh there's no way for me to
to really give a sort of quantitative weighting uh it's all very hand-waving and relative
anybody i think you asked that question too is going to give you a different opinion depending
if they're a tribalist the maximalist the trick queen or what their experiences have been
you know if they were hacked if they lost their money they're going to lose their money
you know if they were hacked if they lost money there's a lot of emotion that goes into this and
what i would say to anybody that's new to this stuff or is looking into it is you know read
the white papers read the use cases understand why there's different types of coins out there
why there's different forks why there's different versions of bitcoin even um even though you know
we should only really be recognizing one of them um and what i mean by that is everybody's use
case is different so i've i've had my own opinions and i've talked to people in this industry that
like a coin that i have no interest in because it has different settlement time and that's what's
important to them or they use it because it's more privacy focused right it's got some privacy
shielding features baked into it that may not be in other coins or protocols or there's drafts or
proposals to implement that stuff but maybe it's not fully integrated on chain a versus chain b
so i've heard people actually give me some convincing arguments about why they like certain
technology and coins and it really comes down to the use case uh some people are proof of work
versus proof of stake fans other people like settlement times or low transaction fees and i
don't i'm not going to tell you that you're wrong for reading into one or one or the other everybody
should do their research and come to their own conclusions and if somebody that you know has
worked for various companies in this industry and has gone back and forth there's really only one or
two coins that i keep coming back to and there's a reason i keep coming back to them so i will leave
it at that thank you nesky i added you to the stage do you have a question for us
yeah absolutely i uh good to say everyone no so yeah question so a lot of my patients are excited
about beep 119 cltv and some are actually concerned so uh james and ronaldick was wondering
if you could just give your take on on this thing oh juicy drama um okay so i i'm a fan i'm i'm
actually a um a sponsor of jeremy rubin um i i like the work that he's been doing i like the idea of
covenants um i'm not pushing for you know activation of of any one thing at this time
my my sort of take on the whole covenants issue is that uh
uh jeremy cares a lot about covenants and a lot of other people don't seem to care much
or at least they don't seem to care as much to put uh as much effort into covenants as jeremy has
so it is it's kind of you know disappointing to see sometimes how slowly the development process
can be this is not a new thing by any means i think jeremy has been working on uh covenants
for two if not three years now um and on the plus side there's been a lot more uh conversation
about it and that's what i think is needed uh need to keep having discussions about you know
what the optimal covenants solution should be i think we all know from uh you know previous
consensus rollout stuff is that uh you're trying to rush anything is is going to end up with uh
people getting upset and and bad things happening but i can also i can understand jeremy's point of
view of just trying to put some more pressure on uh you're getting more input into this issue so
so um covenants is interesting you know from a security model perspective of being able to
you know be more descriptive about where your bitcoin can flow to i think we're going to need
a lot more tooling to really be able to understand the ramifications of that and you know one of my
my issues when it comes to you know creating logical flows for your bitcoin that are kind
of like escape hatches is that you then need to also worry about the security properties of
whatever keys are securing the wallet that they're going to so you don't even necessarily need to
have covenants for something like this um you know we could fairly trivially even today with
with taproot and tap scripts create for example a um a degrading multi-sig setup where after so many
blocks or so many years in time um you can then spend the funds with a different set of keys
and and so you know or or even you know with a a smaller spending threshold of your current set of
keys and this provides you know some interesting ways to get out of scenarios where you might
otherwise lose access to your money but you know i don't i don't have a um a perfect you know silver
bullet answer of like we need to be able to implement this one specific uh workflow you know
this is a much more you know generic tool that people are going to start building on top of and
so just like we see with other smart contracting systems you know people are going to make mistakes
they're going to they're going to use the tool to end up creating systems that actually have
vulnerabilities or or weaknesses and um you know that's the name of the game when it comes to
security is sort of trial by fire and learning by failure i'm uh i'm a person that's very appreciative
of some of the drama and the inflating that happens in the community and it's a weird thing
to say people are sick of it they're exhausted they're tired um in the early days of reddit
it was bitcoin versus rbtc and they talked about colored coins and things like that and then we
saw ethereum happen right in the rc20s um there was the small the small block versus big block
and soft work versus hard work and user acceptance and all of this stuff and what i what i would say
to this is the fact that there's drama and that this is being debated is a win for bitcoin it
means that consensus is working and that we're all adhering to it right if there's questions
about things or ambiguity we're not going to activate it or mine are going to signal for it
or whatever the mechanism is at the time um and and we need to answer those questions and get
everybody on board and get a full understanding so like that's the beauty of this design and
consensus and community is that it's working right we're able to inflate we're able to
debate these decisions whereas the flip side i've seen you know gals that are running these
decentralized organizations and when you look at their snapshot page or their voting history
they've got 70 proposals where everybody just votes yes for every single one of them and maybe
those 70 proposals are good or maybe they were written with all intention but in in my review
of some of that stuff it just seems like it's a group think and hide mind uh and everybody's
kind of going with the flow right they're being the sheep so the fact that we can have discourse
and discussion and really get into the weeds and debate these types of things before we all come to
consensus is a win and i'm very appreciative of that yeah absolutely i think it's um still remains
to be seen what miners are going to do right when they vote um but um yeah i like totally agree with
you is that just having those discussions really that's what kind of really matters and uh but it
also was fascinating to see that amongst my patients that a bunch of people became like almost
instantly unstable and uh very concerned about uh beep 119 cltv and uh yeah so those discussions
are productive absolutely yeah i mean maybe people are just concerned or under because it's
you know creating some friction and drama um personally i would like to see you know more of
the proponents of like the any prevout uh which is my understanding is basically the main other
competing potential covenant proposal i just want to see you know them put more uh more pressure
into you know dialogue and and consensus building um there was i think almost nobody in the
community was around for it and so almost nobody ever talks about it anymore but there was a really
really um dramatic debate in like 2011 or 2012 about uh which of two proposals for uh what
uh what eventually became uh paid a script hash was uh and i think luke dashier had one and gavin
andreson had one and and gavin ended up getting his in uh you know arguably by being a bit forceful
about it uh and sort of saying you know this is what consensus is going to be um so you know there's
a very long history of um fairly like ferocious uh technical debates happening around the bitcoin
protocol thank you um crypto for all added to the stage do you have a question for us
yeah how you doing there i was just uh well i was wondering your thoughts on the uh coin base uh
uh or the coin base wallet as a storage for your bitcoins
uh so you got to be kind of careful here because i think a lot of people um they have the coin base
app for basically the brokerage and exchange and you know they buy their bitcoin there and then they
just leave it there um this is where you get into the whole not your keys not your coins issue
um you know there's a lot of potential risks when you're leaving your money with a third party
now coin base also has a wallet which to my understanding is just like a phone app basically
the the keys are sitting there on your phone um and you know this is what i would consider to be
like sort of the first step into self-custody um it's it's arguably better in many ways than
leaving your money with the third party uh however now you know if all of your funds are sitting
in some private keys that are on your phone that's creating a whole new set of risks so um
you know we we do have uh one wallet that is architected like that within the casa app
and our general recommendation and in fact the app itself will start yelling at you if you have like
more than a thousand dollars in that particular setup because it's risky um you should only really
have as much money in a single signature phone um wallet as i would say you would carry around
in your wallet in real life in cash it's just a lot more ways to lose it so you know once you
start having a more significant amount of value in bitcoin that's when you need to to look at
getting you know dedicated hardware devices so that the keys are never touching an internet
connected device you know that protects you from a whole new class of issues and then once you get
into having you know really substantial amounts of money that's when i think it makes sense to
start looking at multi-signature setups where you're you're basically adding more resiliency
and redundancy against having single points of failure that could cause wasa funds
all right thanks a lot there
thank you um and this is all the time we have for today thank you so much for joining us um
ron james and any final thoughts on the uh the topic of cryo preservation and wealth security
over the next century it's uh it's it's a really risky uh situation there's a ton of things that
can go wrong but kind of like dan was saying if you don't even try you're definitely gonna fail
yeah i agree with that i think we're not there yet we're building our way there right it's like
year one of bitcoin we got a walk before he can run with this and i would say for the people that
are worried about this that are considering it um you know we can do inheritance today so that is
what's available and castle offers that type of uh that product as well so if that's something
you're worried about that's the definitive for sure go-to methodology but forward looking in
the future this stuff's fun to think about it's interesting problems to work on and i know we're
not done talking about this stuff yet we're going to continue this and try to figure out solutions
i look forward to the living person dead person multi-signature product
awesome well thank you ron thank you jameson and thank you to everyone who listened in
and this concludes our program in the meantime don't trust verify take care everyone
bye